Domestic Violence and the Power and Control Wheel

Having been to 60+ hours of counselling, I am still straining to cope with a traumatic past and physical injuries. Most of my injuries are gone, leaving behind scattered bodily marks and dozens of photos that bear witness to my once blood-smeared face and bruises that covered different body parts at different times in a time span of over a year. They say “Time heals all wounds.” They say “In time everything will be okay.” But those are just what they say. I now have a permanent warp in my nose cartilage from a physical assault, causing severe breathing obstruction from time to time.

Some other things also don’t get better in time. Dozens of counseling sessions that aimed to help me overcome the emotional abuse and trauma have had some progress but have seemingly stopped working after a certain point. It is always in the still of the night that I jolt away to nightmares, which most of the time are not about the physical assault per se, but more often than not filled with immense anxiety arising from physical and emotional threats, intimidation, deliberate isolation, and indifference.

It wasn’t until I was shown this diagram by a domestic violence victim counselor that I started to fully appreciate the scale of the abuse I have been going through. Almost every DV therapist/advocate/social worker talks about the Power and Control Wheel. There are more than one version of it, but they share a basic structure aimed to facilitate understanding of power dynamics in domestic violence. I am using a particularly gender-neutral and gender-fluid one.

“Please look at the wheel and tell me which of them apply in your situation.” I remember being asked in a counseling room the first time I saw one of these.

A lot of them do. More than I had thought.

Reviewing the Power and Control Wheel was to become a routine in a conversation I was to have with every new counselor.

In other posts on this blog, I will detail the kind of abuse, violence, and isolation I have been subjected to, but here I just wanted to briefly go down the list and check off things as they come to mind. Most of the things I list here can be substantiated by screenshots from her own Facebook chats that I have uploaded or will be uploading.

• Using privilege:
  • Treating me like a servant:
    • Yes. The relationship was missing reciprocity entirely. Dai told me without me taking care of her she couldn’t possibly keep on. But she would use very abusive, demeaning language in our daily communication, demanding I do things her way. She once told a white fraternity guy that I wasn’t her boyfriend but her chef instead, and my value was that I knew how to cook. There should be screenshots of this in the picture section.
  • Making all the big decisions:
    • For the most part of our dating, my life had to revolve around her. I took care of her, cooking and cleaning for her. The sad thing is I actually wanted to. I thought it was love.
  • Being the one to define gender roles
    • To this day I still believe we were subverting traditional heterosexual gender roles. I dedicated a part of my life to her betterment and convenience, which ironically became the reason for the intense hatred of her white male friends.
  • Using privilege to discredit me; putting me in danger;
    • Dai actively and very successfully tried to isolate me. She sought out my friends on Facebook, people I had introduced her to but didn’t know her, and added them. Then she began telling people I had mental issues. Her Facebook chat screenshots show she wanted to cut me off from the rest of the world by alienating me from my social contacts. She and her mother also take advantage of their class privilege to discredit and dehumanize me, making it impossible for me to seek justice.
  • Cutting off my access to resources
    • Yes. By Dai’s mother’s mere words, I was banished from several research groups and chat groups on China’s labor movement, for the simple reason that Dai’s mother is powerful and well-known in those circles. Dai’s mother cut off my access to my ongoing research on labor rights in China, while Dai cut off my access to my college professors. Several widely recognized Chinese labor activists have known Dai’s abusive behavior toward me for years, but when I, under threats of violence and constant abuse, turned to them for help, they all turned their back to me, simply because Chun Dai asked them to. I don’t have a powerful and influential mother or a well-heeled father, so I deserve to be physically assaulted by someone who does and brutalized by her white male friends?
  • Using the system against me
    • Yes. When I tried to report her plagiarism, I was met with physical and death threats. Dai also ordered me not to contact any of my college professors, accusing me of attempting to damage her relationships with “her professors”, people who I had introduced her to. She even gloated that my report of her plagiarism to a faculty member “enraged her professors” and “they all hated me” for that. She and her family, being well-connected, rich, and influential, have been able to employ the system against me, barring every possibility for me to even get my voice heard. Dai has used her connections with popular students, incidentally almost all of them white males, and Dai’s mother Chun Dai used her powerful and commanding ties with people in power to intimidate me and gag me into silence. Their juggernaut ability to mobilize the entire system and swing it to the side of white racism and oppression against a single socially vulnerable Asian person from a lower social class is beyond belief.

• Isolation
  • Limiting my outside activities
    • I used to be active in Duke’s activist scene, especially among Asian American activist groups. People from my time should remember me attending and occasionally speak up at numerous events/panel discussions on race, gender, and social justice. To ensure I couldn’t get outside help, Dai ordered me not to go to these events any more and not to talk to friends I used to know very well.
  • Using jealousy to control
    • Dai was very jealous throughout our relationship. She stalked my ex-partners’ social media pages and often talked ill of them. “How could you date her? She is so not pretty.” She tried to confine my at home, removing me from social life. She also added my friends she barely knew on Facebook, telling them I “needed help” because I had “mental issues,” and asking them not to believe whatever I said. In the mean time, she kept her own friends hidden from me. Until I saw her Facebook messages, I had had no clue she was talking to multiple white guys, most them juniors and seniors at the time and fraternity members at Duke, and using highly abusive language to refer to me.
  • Controlling who I see or talk to
    • Yes. She did a lot of things to limit my interactions with people other than her. There was one time that I implied that I met people she knew, and she immediately started a witch hunt among her friends. She asked them if they were the people that had talked to me. See the uploaded screenshots for this part.
  • Saying no one will believe me
    • Yes. Dai Li repeatedly told me no one would ever believe me, regardless of all the photos of my own injuries. She eventually sent me an incensed email in late 2017 after learning about me filing a police report and telling on her plagiarism, stating that my attempts to “sabotage her relationship with her professors” would all fail.
    • Her friends popular, low life, family

• Denying, minimizing, and blaming
  • Making light of the abuse
    • Yes. After she left a permanent injury in my nose, she said “Your nose was like that.” and then went on to comment that other injuries on my body were nothing serious.
  • Saying it didn’t happen
    • Yes! It was extremely upsetting for me to later come across the messages she sent to some friends on Facebook days after she severely injured my nose and my body. She joked about my injuries and said it was just some “old injuries”.
  • Shifting responsibility for abusive behavior
    • She always blamed me for her abusive behavior. In the beginning stages, she cited “You didn’t cherish me” as the reason for her change to more aggressive demeanor. Later it would become “How else would you expect me to treat you?”
  • Saying it was my fault; accusing me of “mutual abuse”
    • Yes. She told many of her friends and my friends that I was mentally unbalanced and abusive. In addition, she also told them I had protested her physical abuse and violent threats. Despite knowing my protests and my fear, her white male friends fervently agreed that I was a problem and volunteered to find me and assault me.
  • Saying women can’t abuse
    • Yes. This is actually coming from her male friends.
  • Saying “it was just fighting,” not abuse
    • Yes. In multiple occasions in her Facebook chats, she told her friends who were having “fights”.

• Emotional abuse
  • Putting me down
    • Yes. One of her favorite things to do was comparing me with her white friends. “That guy is taller than you.” “He speaks better English than you.” She would ask me to explain passages from class readings and ideas in critical theory, and then would come to me the next day to tell me, “My friend said it meant something else. You were wrong. He is American, so he is getting it right.” She also belittled me for not speaking French. Ironically it was at my suggestion that she started taking French, first at Oberlin College, then at Duke. She made a hobby out of putting me down and frequently said things like “Armand said this. Did you even know that?” Armand was her French instructor at Duke, and a sense of superiority from learning French and from knowing popular people on campus permeated a lot of conversations she had with me.
  • Making me feel bad about myself
    • Apart from gas-lighting me, more than once Dai made comments about my grades at Duke. “You only got an A- in Michael Hardt’s class?! Everybody gets an A in that class.” “How did you even get a B+?” I didn’t know how to respond. But in fact that semester I was taking six classes AND sitting in on one, AND writing papers for her two Oberlin classes at the same time. Any slight mentions of these were met with vehement responses and more put-downs. She often took the same classes I did and gloated to and poured scorn on me after receiving higher scores than I did. I was happy for her, except that I took her take-home exam for Gareth Price’s Introduction to Linguistics, that I had to be on stand-by with ready-made answers and explanations for her class readings, and that I had to write her papers for a number of other classes. She also made frequent disparaging comments about my family means and social standing. “How could I be with some one like you from such a lowly family?” She said.
  • Name calling
    • Yes. She used the word BITCH to refer to me in her conversations with other people on Facebook. In those conversations, I have also been called CHINK, DOUCHE, LIAR, PETTY, PATHETIC.
  • Playing mind games
    • Yes. Initially she was just using the white guys to make me jealous and get my attention, or so I thought. Soon she seemed to start to enjoy her popularity among fraternity guys and being wanted and lusted after by them. When I tried to leave her, she spammed my phone and email inbox with profusely apologetic messages begging me to come back to her. There were over 500 text messages, WeChat messages, Facebook messages, Google Chat messages, and emails sent by her after I one-sidedly ended our relationship, left her, and stopped talking to her. She would keep calling my phone over 20 times in one hour after realizing I meant business. She always managed to persuade me to go back to her. In retrospect I shouldn’t have allowed her to yo-yo me back and forth. I am putting up some of the emails in screenshots. There is a lot more emails sitting in my inbox. Later in our relationship she would use different email accounts and Google accounts to try to contact me if I didn’t respond.
  • Making me feel guilty
    • Yes. As I was graduating from Duke, I made plans to work with a labor organization in China for a year, but Dai guilt-tripped me into staying with her and taking care of her at Duke. Initially it was just an irresistible pout, followed usually by such words as “So I don’t even know where you are going to be next year. How will the relationship work?” I remember an episode in 2015 when she found my years-old Google Chat messages with my ex and yelled at me, “You don’t love me!”

• Intimidation
  • Displaying weapons
    • Yes. She pulled a knife on me a few times either when I asked her to leave the room but she refused or when I tried to leave. Scared for my safety and hoping to keep evidence, I did manage to snap a few pictures of that and I have sent the pictures to Durham Police Department when I first filed my report. A few other people have also seen those pictures. I am debating whether I should post those photos here.
  • Smashing things
    • Yes. I think I managed to snap some photos of this.

• Coercion and threats
  • Making and carrying out threats to harm me
    • Yes. Eventually she did make good on her threats that her white male friends would “come get me”.
  • Threatening to commit suicide.
    • Yes. Many times when I expressed my wish to leave, either temporarily for same space or for good, she threatened to kill herself. She even pulled a knife, first threatened me with it, then threatened to kill herself.

• Using economic abuse
  • Preventing me from keeping a job
    • I had to give up a number of opportunities I was presented with at graduation in order to stay with her and take care of her.
  • Keeping my name off joint assets
    • Yes. She never allowed my name to appear in our leases or subleases. She used that as a way to control and confine me. Because of that, multiple times in her Facebook chats fraternity guys eager to get involved volunteered to forcibly “remove me” or “kick me out”. In much the same way they talk about “removing illegals”. Toxic white masculinity at its best.

Also closely relevant to my case is this Power and Control Wheel for immigrants. After dating for almost two years, we got married in August 2016, in her hometown of Changsha, Hunan. I then changed my legal status in the U.S. to F2 spouse visa. Dai Li said she was overjoyed I could stay by her side, but since that time she has used her status as my visa sponsor (F1) to intimidate and control me.

• Using legal status privilege
  • Threatening to withdraw papers:
    • Yes. More than once she ordered me to shut up, otherwise she would withdraw my papers. After she learned that I finally reported my abuse to the Domestic Violence Unit at Durham Police Department, Dai wrote an angry email to me and claimed that she only married me to “help me stay in the U.S.” She speaks of me, a Duke University graduate, as worthless and needing her to get legal status.
• Intimidation
  • Hiding or destroying important papers:
    • Yes. After I reported Dai’s plagiarism to a faculty member, Dai swiftly learned about it and refused to let me get my passport along with my other belongings that I had left at her place. In desperation, I called and messaged her mother Chun Dai for help. As my WeChat screenshots obviously show, she completely ignored me. They withheld my passport for several weeks. Then a white guy started texting me and calling me in a very disdainful, hostile and aggressive manner, asking me to go to a location he designated to get my stuff. I feared for my safety and called Duke Police, which enraged Dai Li and her white male friends and unleashed torrential outpouring of violent threats.
• Threats
  • Threatening to get me deported.
    • Dai made those threats multiple times after I told I couldn’t take her abuse any more and if she didn’t stop I would go to school officials about her fraudulent application to Duke and her plagiarism at Duke and Oberlin. In her Facebook chats, she told her fraternity friends that I was trying to get her kicked out of school. They responded by volunteering to “get involved” with me.